But Scrounger isn't through yet.  He's in a blind run, heading for'ard, because he knows he needs time to think, and for that he needs to put some distance between himself and his pursuer.

He races up a slope, then turns hard a-port and pretty much slides down another.  The deck is warped and buckled in places, but the gradients have more to do with the angle at which the wreck is lying.

There's another bulkhead door, rusted open and hanging on one hinge: Scrounger remembers when he cut the first hinge and levered himself enough of a gap to scramble through.  Hard work, but breaking into a treasure trove was never meant to be easy.

Now, Scrounger forces himself over the bulkhead rim in the same way and drops neatly into the vault.  From there, he clambers up a succession of racks and pipes and other fixtures and along the length of a sleek torpedo.  Some of the torpedo's innards are exposed from where he previously looted its precious warhead and some of its electronics, but Scrounger hasn't time to pause and admire his handiwork.  He's crawling rapidly over the other crates of munitions, making for one of the loading tubes.  The Stevedore is a supply ship: the munitions, like the fuel, get delivered to other hungry vessels by tube.

He has found a way out.

But the angle is steep and the pipe cramped and long.  And already, he can hear giant pincers snapping and scraping at the crack in the bulkhead door behind him.

Scrounger thinks that maybe Meathook's traded in his shell for a larger one; that maybe he won't be able to fit in here and will just sit outside, snapping his pincers furiously, frustratedly into the room.  The shockwave from each snap hits Scrounger like a hammer blow.  His strengthened shell can withstand the impact, but his nerves are good and rattled.  Even more so than they already were.

There is a water and steel earthquake inside the room.  Meathook has somehow severed the other hinge.  The door has fallen.

His brain ringing like a clapper in a bell, Scrounger heaves the tube cover closed; it is a minimal obstacle for something the size of Meathook, but he has to try.  Claws grabbing at every available hold, he half pulls himself and half scoots up to the closed end of the cylinder.  Back against the wall.

Now there's only a tube door and one short fall between Scrounger and the open seabed.  A sealed tube door that hasn't been opened since this doomed vessel put to sea.  He fires up his laser cutter, and watches the beam falter as it boils the water around it.  Low on battery power.  This is going to be tight.

Scrounger knows he has only himself to blame.  What wonderful irony: he has run himself into a corner of his own making.

Scrounger doesn't want to hide here for the rest of his life.  Scrounger wants to get back to the Beach.

But all too soon, Meathook comes knocking.